Memoir Monday is a collaboration between The Rumpus, Narratively, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub to bring the very best first-person writing together in a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series.
The reading series usually takes place at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, but we’re observing social distancing rules by holding it on Zoom instead! March’s event took place on Monday, 3/15 and featured readings from Candace Jane Opper, Marcos Gonsalez, Jeannine Ouellette, and Randa Jarrar. If you missed the live event, you can watch the video below—and then sign up for the Memoir Monday newsletter so you can be sure to catch the next one in real time!
(Please also consider supporting these wonderful writers and The Rumpus by visiting our Bookshop storefront and purchasing their books today!)
You can browse the Memoir Monday book list that was mentioned in the video here.
About the readers:
Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a visual artist. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, selected by Cheryl Strayed for the Kore Press Memoir Award. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Literary Hub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. She grew up in the woods of Southern Connecticut and now lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.
Marcos Gonsalez is an essayist, author, and professor of literature living in New York City. Marcos’ debut memoir, Pedro’s Theory, was published by Melville House this past January. Marcos’s essays have appeared in BuzzFeed, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.
Jeannine Ouellette is the author of The Part That Burns, a memoir in fragments. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Narrative, North American Review, Masters Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Writer’s Chronicle, among others, and in several anthologies including Ms. Aligned: Women Writing about Men and Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Her work has been supported by Millay Colony for the Arts and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. She teaches writing through the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Elephant Rock, an independent creative writing program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel.
Randa Jarrar is the author of the novel A Map of Home, the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, and the memoir Love Is an Ex-Country. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award. A professor of creative writing and a performer, Jarrar lives in Los Angeles.
About the host:
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, named one of the “most recommended books of the season” by Literary Hub; and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, forthcoming in 2021. Lilly is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, and her writing has been published by Longreads, The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.
